1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the sales of merchandise on the Internet, and, in particular, to sales from online stores, i.e., e-shops, and, in greater particularity, to sales from stores that are members of a host mall that provides directed advertising as a part of the e-commerce environment.
2. Description of the Prior Art
An online commercial transaction between a user/buyer and a provider/merchant takes places over a communications network, in particular, the Internet wherein each party normally has a computer connected thereto. In order for the user to find the website of the provider of a particular product and/or service, the user types one or more words into a search engine. This usually results in numerous hits sometimes even millions. Preferred advertisers/merchants may be listed at the top of each page to lead users to their sites whether they are, in fact, the best website for this product and/or service. Thus the user is forced into reviewing many websites to find an appropriate one for that product and/or service. If the user/buyer/customer desires to purchase/order goods/services, the user must enter certain personal financial information as related to a particular credit/debit card into the website. The merchant takes this personal financial information and sends it to the banking system for approval. After approval, the merchant ships the good as directed by the user.
It is further possible that the website of the provider/merchant does have the ability to provide RSS feed. This feature normally requires that the provider/merchant employ the services of a programming source to create the RSS feed and update as necessary. Typical providers would not have this experience. Again, the problem is that the user/buyer must find this website and then subscribe to the RSS feed from that website. Another source of difficulty is that the user/buyer may be in need of many products and/or services and thus would be forced to find websites for each and then subscribe to each of these RSS feeds, if they are even available. It is further unlikely that the feed will be directed solely at the product desired. A recent report has indicated that only about 10% of the merchant websites even have the ability to provide RSS feeds reflecting the additional costs and difficulties in keeping this RSS feed updated. In order to avoid this issue, many merchants subscribe to other services to obtain users. Two of these services are pay-per-click (PPC) and pay-per-impression (PPI). These services and indeed costly and can result in no more users than normal and even result in fraudulent activity such as multiple clicking on a competitor's website to drive up the costs. The main desire of a merchant is to be linked to a user who will buy the products and/or services offered. The problem is the linking between these two entities.
With the advent of increased online transactions, this has presented an outstanding opportunity, as compared to face-to-face transactions, for illegal activity centering on procuring personal credit/debit information by many different means well known to one skilled in that art such as spyware. The more websites visited by the user/buyer, the greater the chance of this information being stolen.
The illegal user, meaning a person who has no legal right to use the credit/debit card, normally obtains this information by intrusive activities over a communications network as compared to physical activities such as theft of card information from receipts, etc. The communications network may include any network for transferring information via electrical means (e.g., on wires), electromagnetic means (e.g., microwave transmissions by satellite or point-to-point ground locations using antennae) and optical means (e.g., fiber optic cables) technologies. Many people fear the theft of personal information and information related to financial issues when using the Internet and will thus avoid using the Internet, or will not access sites having interactive inputs, or will not enter any personal or financial information.
Although users are legally protected from the illegal use of their cards, banks, credit/debit card companies, and merchants are not protected. A user must report this illegal use within 60 days, typically, to receive refunds. Encryption of transmitted data and the use of dedicated lines by financial institutions offer a high level of protection, but merchants who use the world wide web (WVVW) will still bear the burden of Internet fraud by the loss of merchandise and chargebacks to their accounts.
A conventional transaction between an online user/buyer and a merchant requires the transfer of personal financial information. Referring to FIG. 1, a user/buyer 10 enters a website 12 of the provider/merchant 14 and selects the merchandise to purchase by adding it to a cart, for example. A typical checkout screen 16 is shown in FIG. 2 and presents a standard form for submitting credit/debit card information such as card type, card number, expiration date, and a unique identifier on the card being either a three or four digit number that the user 10 has obtained from the issuing card bank 18. The merchant 14 then submits this information for authorization to a credit/debit card clearing agency 16 that verifies this information from the issuing bank 18. Upon authorization to the merchant 12, the user 10 is required to complete other screen pages during checkout or edit information presented therein. Further information regarding delivery of the goods/services is requested from the user 10 on a second ordering screen such as shown in FIG. 3. Once the user selects the order button 20 of an approved purchase, a confirmation screen page such as shown in FIG. 4 is sent to the user 10. The merchant 12 then submits this information to a shipper 22 that has the goods/services delivered as requested. This transaction involves the transfer of a significant amount of information between the parties, some of which the user 10 might find personal and private. It is further clear that this information may be retained for future use by the merchant 12, the clearing agency 16, the issuing card bank 18, and the shipper 22. A detailed discussion of this process and others is explained in U.S. Pat. No. 7,069,249, issued Jun. 27, 2006, entitled, “Electronic Purchase of Goods over a Communications Network including Physical Delivery while Securing Private and Personal Information of the Purchasing Party,” to Stolfo et al. This patent is incorporated by reference.
In a typical scenario, the credit card thief obtains a credit card by stealing a wallet or pursue or by use of a credit card receipt. This may result from an unscrupulous sales clerk who records the 3 or 4 digit printed number on the back of the card since this number is not transferred by the machine that imprints the raised numbers and letters to the receipt. This type of theft does not appear until the credit card statement is received by the user. With this information, the thief can make purchases online, but must change the shipping address. Until the credit card is cancelled, the thief will continue to exhaust the account until the credit limit is reached. If the merchandise is delivered, it will most likely never be returned. The victim user must then dispute the unauthorized purchases and may or may not, depending on their bank's aggressiveness, receive a credit on their account within 60 days of the theft. This may also be disputed by the e-shop which further delays any resolution. The victim user may be even forced to hire an attorney to pursue this issue. If the dispute is settled in favor of the victim user, the credit account is credited and the account of the merchant is given a chargeback.
Accordingly, there is an established need for an online transaction system between a user and a merchant where a dedicated online company links these entities together.